So, recently I got a Switch (I love it!), and been playing Zelda, but since there’s only 32GB of Flash memory inside, I decided to dig up an old SD card I’ve been using in my Dell Venue 8 Pro (a reaaaallly neat Windows 10 tablet) before I decided to sit on it (seriously., tablets that fit your back pocket are the worst).

But as I tried to check for data my PC wouldn’t recognise it (acted as if there’s no valid partitioning present). “I must have installed Linux on it”, I thought, and promptly inserted it into my Switch deciding to format it there, and as i did that, switch hung up with gray screen and became unresponsive to everything including the power button. I thought “Shit” and as I wanted to take out the card it was reaaaallly hot and burned my finger a little (these things are pretty small).

I thought, “wow! that was scary” and I noticed that the card back sticker has moved and there’s my fingerprint on it, and also a small mark left on the switch. So I took some pictures and tweeted about that!

But before I know it this escalated into a disaster of people blaming the Switch. I wrote that it was the SD card fault in a following tweet. But… nobody reads “following” tweets and now I just seen this in a youtube video and a news outlet picked up on that. And now I feel bad so the tweet goes DOWN and here’s the full story.

MicroSD cards are really small. And a 128GB one contain 1,099,511,627,776 bits of data. If each of this bits was a tiny 1mm x 1mm tile, this would take 1 square kilometer! But it all fits into this tiny card!

Slightest error might cause a piece of insulation inside the card to be missing, thus creating a short circuit that will dissipate heat. That can also happen after time, as SD cards heat up quite a bit under normal operation.

Stuff breaks. I wouldn’t even ask for a replacement as this spent a year in my drawer. Perhaps it was even me who damaged mechanically it be accident. Perhaps it was radiation, or another device. Perhaps it was a bad batch. Who knows! Well, I don’t! But this escalated beyond reason so I took the thing down. Farewell, fake news!

My sincere apologies for all the confusion this caused. I did not mean that.

tl;dr I used a broken SD card. These are pretty rare. There’s no need to panic. The tweet is fake news and I took it down.

PS. Here are all the fake news, some of who decided to write their own part of this story for dramatic effect (chekc out these headlines!):

EDIT: removed the Japanese website, as it seems it listed the thing right! Apologies for more confusion!

EDIT 2: People are saying some of the news coin Amazon review from a different card! That was actually me doing this in the first place. The thing is, it seems that Amazon lists a single SD card review across multiple models! Talk about misinformation! Here is how it looks

EDIT 3: Found my favourite. This youtube video with a guy saying, I quote: “Apparently, his Switch overheated to the point his SD card got turned to mush. Can’t make this shit up.“ Well, you just did.

3 Responses to “Fried 128GB microSD card in a Switch clarification.”

Good that you wrote a clarifying post about it. It is scary how fast false information spreads.
I feel like SanDisk should send you a “we’re mad that you dragged us down but thanks for rowing back” package :D